The sudden wave of interest in Nordic cuisine inspired Julie Karla to launch a big recipe portal with Nordic food recipes catered to the American market. Julie Karla, a well-known Danish food blogger and national champion of home cooking, collaborated with Mikkel Jersin, a project manager, to create www.karlasnordickitchen.com, which features easy-to-make healthy food based on organic recipes.

“Unfortunately, none of us are experts when it comes to websites, programming, or getting traffic for a website,” Mikkel said. “In fact, we hardly knew anything about it when we started the project. Our one and only starting point was a bunch of Nordic recipes that Julie developed in our kitchen and her local food blog.”

Mikkel and Julie needed more than one person to help them set up the website and they weren’t sure if their shoestring budget would allow them to hire professionals in Denmark. With a budget of $800, they wanted to be able to hire a developer, translator, writer, SEO specialists, and illustrator.

“A site like this would cost 5-10 times as much in Denmark or possibly a lot more. The price for such things here is so enormously expensive that we didn’t even try to do it in Denmark. The translation of the recipes alone would break the budget,” Mikkel said.

They decided to rely on Freelancer.com, the world’s largest outsourcing marketplace. First, they hired someone from Canada to translate Danish recipes to American standard. They needed an illustrator next to make the site more personal and found a Nigerian artist who did more than 50 drawings. Also included in their team were a Romanian SEO analyst, an American ghostwriter living in Pakistan, a team of Indian SEO specialists, and an Indian website developer.

“The process works like a breeze and it’s even quite fun when posting a project. All the bids coming in rapidly from all over the world, choosing the team, and getting to know them while working with them. To us, it’s really amazing that this is actually possible. We have dreamed about doing this project for years, but we couldn’t find the right people to help us within our budget and with the right qualifications. Had we known how easy it was, we would have done it years ago. For anyone planning to set up a business, we strongly recommend they dive in and get started straight away,” Mikkel said.